Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

Reliability – not price – is what really matters to resellers and customers when it comes to connectivity says Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing at Entanet.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing

It’s always easy to focus on price when it’s all that the customer seems to be focused on and especially when connectivity services are promoted as a commodity. Do businesses really want a cheap service that can’t be relied upon?

At Entanet we’ve never espoused or promoted the low-cost-only route to selling. We always encourage and support our partners in promoting the key values of connectivity and, while this may seem like an obvious point to make, it’s one we believe is important to re-iterate time and time again because it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of selling on price and little else in a competitive and crowded market.

In last weeks article (Part one) we started to look at the ‘connectivity scale’ and looked at the growing options around copper and fibre based broadband that are driving customers’ expectations of faster and more reliable services. Today we look at Ethernet based products that build on these expectations and deliver service attributes that are even more essential to business critical connectivity. Let’s start with GEA…

Stephen Barclay, Head of Sales

GEA

GEA is a new service which begins to bridge the gap between fibre broadband and Ethernet based solutions. Like FTTC, GEA utilises the existing copper infrastructure (a single copper pair) between the customer premises and the cabinet and then uses fibre back to the exchange. However, from the exchange it delivers the traffic across the Ethernet core network, not the broadband one. This means it can deliver an uncontended and dedicated service with service guarantees. GEA provides a comprehensive SLA, choice of backup options and a 9 business hour return to service guarantee, making it an attractive and cost effective option for business customers looking for a guaranteed service with short installation times and symmetrical speeds from 2Mbps up to 20Mbps.

Last year in April the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) and CAP (Committee of Advertising Practice) released new guidelines governing the advertising of broadband speeds and ‘unlimited’ broadband packages.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing

In a previous article ASA broadband guidelines – What will it mean for resellers? we discussed the details of the guidelines, the likely impact on end users and for the industry and what they would entail for resellers. We came to the conclusion that although we recognised that the ASA and CAP were attempting to protect consumers and prevent them from being misled, the guidelines would cause further confusion and could potentially have a negative impact on the digital divide in the UK. We feared that these guidelines would put a lot of providers off advertising altogether and that this could lead to speed information being withdrawn completely. A year on we review the situation and see what the effect has been.

In the face of widespread debate about net neutrality and increasing consumer unrest about how Fair Use Policies and traffic management affects their broadband experience , the Broadband Stakeholder group (BSG) and seven of the UK’s largest ISPs have published a new Voluntary Code of Practice regarding broadband transparency. This new code of practice will be piloted by BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, O2, Three and Vodafone throughout 2011, with review and potentially further adoption by other ISPs in early 2012.

Neil Watson, Head of Service Operations

Commenting on the new code Antony Walker, CEO of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, said:
“There has been more heat than light in the debate about traffic management over recent years. This commitment to provide clear and comparable information in a common format is very important. It will not only help to ensure consumers are better informed about the services they buy and use, but will also provide a clearer picture for policy makers of the way in which traffic management is actually used in the UK market.

Consumers need to be able to make informed choices about the services they buy and policy makers need to be able to make informed decisions about the policy and regulatory framework they set. This new commitment provides an essential building block for getting both of these things right.”

There has been an ongoing industry debate over controversial advertising practices regarding broadband for quite some time. ISPs have been criticised repeatedly for advertising broadband quoting maximum achievable headline speeds and for claiming that packages include ‘unlimited’ bandwidth when they are actually subject to Fair Usage Policies (FUPs) and/or traffic shaping. Some argue that advertising broadband in this way causes confusion among customers, often setting their expectations unrealistically high. Therefore last week the ASA (Advertising Standards Agency), BCAP (British Code of Advertising Practice) and CAP (Committee of Advertising Practice) outlined their latest proposals for tackling the issue.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing

Commenting on the review the ASA state: “In 2010 the ASA asked the bodies that write the Advertising Codes (CAP and BCAP) to review broadband speed claims in advertisements as part of a wider look at advertising in the telecommunications sector.

CAP and BCAP are now consulting on their proposals for new advertising guidance on the use of “Up to” broadband speed and “Unlimited” usage claims in telecommunications advertising.

The key issues are whether consumers can actually achieve advertised speeds and “unlimited” usage of telecommunications services as claimed. The objective is to produce guidance for the industry to aid their interpretation of the Misleading Advertising sections of the CAP and BCAP Codes.”

This week the Minister for Communications, Ed Vaizey, backed Ofcom’s decision to step away from regulating net neutrality and leave the market to regulate itself.

Ofcom recently argued that the UK’s ISP market is considered effectively competitive and does not present any evidence of anti-competitive behaviour and should therefore not face restrictions on all forms of traffic management. We recently covered their claims in more detail in our opinion article (opinion.enta.net:Update: Net neutrality – is Ofcom too timid?).

Neil Watson, Head of Service Operations

It seems the Government agrees with Ofcom, with Mr Vaizey stating: “The internet has been responsible for an unprecedented level of innovation, which has led to multi-billion dollar companies being formed in just a couple of years.

This is a model that the British government wishes to protect. A lightly regulated internet is good for business, good for the economy, and good for people.

The government is no fan of regulation and we should only intervene when it is clearly necessary to deliver important benefits for consumers.”

The definition of ‘superfast broadband’ continues to cause confusion amongst the industry and more importantly customers as ISPs lay claim to providing ‘superfast’ services and various government bodies appear to be muddying the waters rather than providing clarification. We asked Editor in Chief of ISPreview.co.uk, Mark Jackson, for his opinion on what exactly constitutes superfast broadband.

So what is superfast broadband?

To most people “broadband” simply means “Internet access”, or perhaps even “faster Internet access”, yet as a descriptive term it’s relatively useless. You can’t define a new technology simply by saying it and its presence in ISP package titles certainly won’t help to describe how fast your expected Internet connection should be.

There was a time when the term broadband became synonymous with “fast Internet access”, albeit spoken in comparison to ancient dialup (narrowband) connections. Similarly most attempts to define the term ultimately remain highly subjective to the time period in which they were first penned, yet crucially what was fast then is slow today.

However an inability to define something so common place as broadband could have serious repercussions for future generations of “super-fast” (Next Generation Access) services, which the government is currently trying to plug as a solution for the country’s aging telecoms infrastructure. After all, just what is “superfast”?

It seems net neutrality, the principle of treating all Internet traffic equally in order to provide a fair and equal service for all users, suffered a further blow when Ofcom announced its decision not to step in as regulator after receiving responses to its traffic management and net neutrality consultation. The consultation was initiated to discuss Ofcom’s regulatory responsibilities and any future duties under the revised framework, along with a debate on why traffic management and net neutrality is important to both citizens and customers. The regulator’s reasoning behind its decision is that the UK’s ISP market is considered effectively competitive and does not present any evidence of anti-competitive behaviour and should therefore not face restrictions on all forms of traffic management. Worryingly, Ofcom has made this announcement despite the fact that BT and the TalkTalk Group freely admitted they’d favour any video or content providers that want to make a ‘deal’ in their Ofcom responses.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, International director of Ofcom, Alex Blowers, said “Ofcom is committed to dealing swiftly with problems as they emerge, but we are also committed to approaching issues in such a way as not to assume a problem before a problem has emerged.” Surely with BT and Talk Talk blatantly stating their intent in their consultation responses it would not be hard to ‘assume’ that this will become a problem in the near future.

It has recently been reported that ISPs are misleading their consumers on the real speeds of their broadband services. We would like to know what you think should be done about the advertising of broadband speeds. Therefore we have added a new poll to find out your thoughts. Remember you can also leave us a comment below.

Our latest article features a guest blog from co-founder of Thinkbroadband.com, Sebastien Lahtinen, regarding the subject of ‘unlimited’ broadband. Mr Lahtinen argues that the concept of ‘unlimited’ broadband is no longer viable and welcomes the proposed ASA review into ISP’s use of the terminology in their advertising of broadband packages. We agree with Mr Lahtinen but are also keen to find out what you think. Therefore we have added a new poll via which you can share your views. Remember you can also leave us a comment below.